President Obama said yesterday he is still several weeks away from adopting a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan.

What's taking so long? Obama wants his plan to include an exit strategy -- or an "endgame" as he put it yesterday. And there isn't one -- at least not one that's politically palatable.

Obama has talked about the need for an exit strategy before, dating back at least to a "60 Minutes" interview in March, during the rollout of his initial Afghan plan. He made the point pretty emphatically: "There's gotta be an exit strategy."

Up until a few months ago, Obama evidently thought he had one. Presumably, it involved handing the country back to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's stable, united government in fairly short order.

But then Karzai's re-election turned into a fiasco, exposing Afghanistan's still-deep divisions and still-profound corruption -- and making it abundantly clear to everyone that there will be no exit under those conditions, certainly not anytime soon.

In fact at this point, according to Paul R. Pillar, a Georgetown University professor who formerly served as the CIA's chief intelligence analyst for the Middle East, it's pretty clear that the goal of leaving behind a stable, democratic Afghanistan is unattainable.

"With the application of military force, some degree of short-term stability over some portion of Afghanistan is probably achievable," Pillar told me. "That is not to say that we have stabilized Afghanistan or that whenever we get out we'll have established some long-term basis for peace and stability. I don't think we can do that."

So is there any alternative to an open-ended commitment? The only genuine exit strategy left involves unilateral disengagement. But politically, that's a nonstarter -- at least for now. It is widely considered inevitable that if Obama began to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan without being able to declare some form of victory, he would be derided in the press and by Republicans as a coward and a quitter.

This is especially true because Obama painted himself into a corner by calling the Afghan campaign a "war of necessity" rather than a war of choice three months ago -- by which time he should have known better.

Vice President Biden, among others, is pushing what many regional experts think is the most realistic plan at this point: Scaling back American forces in Afghanistan and focusing more on Pakistan -- which is where Al Qaeda actually is right now. Biden and others see Pakistan as presenting the real national security threat -- and Afghanistan simply being a futile and costly exercise in nation-building.

But as far as actually pulling the troops out of Afghanistan entirely, Biden's plan doesn't have an endgame either.

Obama's rejection last week of all four alternatives presented by his national security staff marked a turning point for his presidency.

"He has figured out that the stakes are not as great as he once believed; that the commitment looks open-ended; that the conditions there are not promising; and that if he's not careful, this will be a dead weight around the rest of his presidency," says Harvard international relations professor Stephen M. Walt, who also blogs for Foreign Policy. "And so he's looking for an alternative."

It took Obama this long to figure it out, Walt told me, because "I don't think this was an issue he had mastered before he became president. I think that early in the administration, most of the advice he was getting was from one side. It was mostly coming from people who were sort of invested in the mission."

Since then, Walt says, Obama has heard a lot more from others in the administration -- including Biden -- who are skeptical of a military solution in Afghanistan. The Afghan election was a "sobering moment" that made it clear "just how weak our Afghan partner was," Walt says. The U.S. ambassador in Kabul also recently informed the White House of his deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Karzai's government gets it together. And for good measure, White House Budget Director Peter Orszag last week acknowledged that sending 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan would cost an extra $40 billion a year.

"If political realities were not a constraint, disengagement from Afghanistan would be the best course of action," Pillar says. "But I accept the political reality that that is off the table. The president would get pilloried as being a softie and as not having the courage and determination supposedly to stand up for U.S. security. I don't buy any of that criticism myself, but that would be the political reality he's facing."

As it happens, in this case political reality actually diverges quite markedly from public opinion. The public overwhelmingly opposes the war -- 57 percent to 39 percent, according to the latest Associated Press poll. And disengagement from Afghanistan -- even though it's not even being discussed as a serious option in political circles -- is considerably more popular with the American public than escalation, which is almost all anyone in Washington can talk about. The latest CNN poll found that 49 percent of Americans favored reducing the number of troops in Afghanistan -- with 28 percent saying they should all be withdrawn immediately -- compared to less than 40 percent who want to send more.

Generalized public sentiment alone, however, is unlikely to force any American president to consider a military withdrawal without victory. "It is always easier in the short term to stay in than to get out," says Walt. "And therefore the temptation to take one more drink is always there."

What it would take is a great deal of organized political pressure. But there is no significant peace movement pushing for withdrawal. There is, in fact, almost no political manifestation whatsoever of what is the majority view. The political pressure is all coming from one side.

As Pillar explains, Democrats have long been on the defense on national security issues -- and they know that "Republicans could be skillful at exploiting this." He adds: "All it takes is one terrorist attack, nothing even on the 9/11 scale, with some sort of Afghan connections, to punctuate emphatically that line of criticism."

(Relatedly, antiwar scholar Jonathan Schell asks in his syndicated column: "[M]ust liberals and moderates always bow down before the crazy right over national security? What is the source of this right-wing veto over presidents, congressmen, and public opinion? Whoever can answer these questions will have discovered one of the keys to a half-century of American history -- and the forces that, even now, bear down on Obama over Afghanistan.")

In the meantime, says Walt, "I think his 'exit strategy' is going to be to .... focus on trying to build an Afghan partner that you can hand this problem to -- more or less the same way we're handing Iraq back to an Iraqi government -- and hope that after some decent interval either things are going well and we can leave, or it's so obvious to everyone that it's not fixable, that he can say, 'Well at last we tried and now we're going to get out.'"

And while our nation's most predictably superficial media figures are jumping all over Obama for taking too long to make up his mind, the quality of the debate -- not to mention the existence of the debate itself -- is a tremendous improvement over the heedless rush to war in Iraq by the Bush administration.

"Unlike the run-up to war in Iraq, there has been a more wide-ranging national conversation about this," says Walt. "You have a lot of voices out there. Lots of people have questioned what we're doing over there. And I think some of those views may have penetrated within 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Not that they've necessarily carried the day, but they've forced people in the administration to think more broadly."

The conversation, while healthy, is also depressing. "What's really striking about the debate is that even most of the advocates of staying in and doing more... acknowledge that it's going to be very difficult, take a long time, and it still may not succeed," Walt says. "None of them promise success. And so you have this strange situation where even the advocates are not very optimistic. And I think that's telling."

Finally, when it comes to exit strategies, there's one more thing to keep in mind. Three years from now, after the next presidential election, the political calculus will be considerably different.

If Obama wins, Pillar says, "I think in his second term he will have the liberty to do a number of things."

(Also see my March Washington Post column, "Where's the Exit Strategy?" and my September Huffington Post column, over-optimistically titled "Obama Finally Facing Reality in Afghanistan".)

He got it right last time.

Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, was one of eight senators who stood up to oppose the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act in 1999. That repeal, which was signed into law by President Clinton exactly 10 years ago today, broke down the barriers between commercial banking and investment banking, and led to the growth of behemoth financial firms that were able to take enormous risks with impunity, because they were "too big to fail."

"I think we will in 10 years' time look back and say we should not have done this," Dorgan said back then. The video of his speech has become something of a cult favorite for wonks -- ten years, a $700 billion bailout and a major financial crisis later.

Washington has an odd habit of listening to the people who consistently get such things wrong, and ignoring the ones who get them right.

So today, on this solemn anniversary, how about listening to this guy? What does he think we should do now?

"Three things," the senator told me in an interview. "One is to separate investment banks and FDIC-insured banks. Second, prohibit FDIC-insured banks from dealing in risky financial instruments on their own proprietary accounts... And third, abolish 'too big to fail.' If you're too big to fail, you're too big. Too big to fail is what I call no-fault capitalism."

All in all, it's a much more forceful agenda than his party leaders -- including his president -- are advocating.

Why isn't the administration at his side? "You'd have to address that question to the administration," Dorgan said. He did, however, express disappointment. "I would like to see them more aggressive on this issue."

But he's still hopeful. "We don't have any bill on the floor of the House or the Senate to evaluate," said Dorgan, who is not on the Senate's Finance Committee. "My hope is that we'll get a piece of legislation that will restore that separation."

Dorgan said he hasn't yet taken a position on the administration's proposed Consumer Finance Protection Agency, but "clearly there needs to be consumer protection. The question is how."

Also, he said, "I think you have to regulate hedge funds... You have to have transparency on these financial instruments."

And then there's the whole issue of accountability. "It's one of the most frustrating things," Dorgan said. "We essentially have had modern-day bank robbers -- except that they wore gray suits and not masks -- and there's been no accountability for it."

Dorgan has repeatedly called -- fruitlessly -- for a federal task force to investigate and establish accountability for the crisis. What's needed, he said, is an agreed-upon "master narrative" for the story -- and then prosecution of any criminal activity.

Dorgan, who is finishing up his third term in the Senate, is also an author. His latest book, published in May, is titled: "Reckless! How Debt, Deregulation and Dark Money Nearly Bankrupted America and How We Can Fix It".

In it, he writes about the government's obligation to right the tilted playing field of modern free-market capitalism, which currently favors the major players over regular folk. He writes:

Every day we see energy speculators, war profiteers, managed health-care providers, media propagandists, and/or financiers given some unfair advantage over the average consumers and taxpayers, and the cumulative effect of the American people watching selfishness prevail over the public interest has been an undermining of the public's trust in government.

This "anything goes" approach to capitalism has injured the very economy we have aspired to create. It is a philosophy that corporations and markets can be counted on to police themselves....

I'm a big fan of the free-market system. I don't know of any better method of allocating the goods and services. But in a free- market economy it is not unusual to see the big interests pitted against the little guy. When they are allowed to run unchecked or to rig the system, the big interests have the potential to drag down the very economy they need to remain stable and healthy. That is why it is so important we fight for a new era of reform and change to put our country back on track -- giving working people and small businesses the voice and the power to make the changes necessary.

This is not about a liberal or conservative philosophy. It is about making sure our economy and the free-market system work for everybody.

"There's no question the system is rigged against the little guy," Dorgan told me. "The bigger interests have a lot more information. They jerry-rig the system so that they always win."

"I think that has to be one of the lessons that comes out of this experience," he said, noting that it's been "one of the most expensive lessons in the history of our country."

As for what motivated him back in 1999, Dorgan said: "I just felt that merging the risks of investment banks with FDIC-insured banks was going to cause very expensive problems for the taxpayers of the country. And it turns out that's exactly what happened."

WATCH:

Here's Dylan Ratigan "celebrating" the 10th birthday of the Glass-Steagall repeal.

Arianna Huffington and Drew Westen earlier this week posted persuasive arguments that Barack Obama, as president, should govern the way he campaigned for the job: Fired up, with an unswerving focus on changing the status quo and standing up for the people against the vested interests that thrive on politics as usual. Compared to Obama the campaigner, Obama the president has been remarkably timid and conciliatory.

One theory is that what we're seeing is Obama's background as a community organizer coming to the foreground. And as many critics have pointed out, with plenty of justification, the community organizer tendency to seek consensus can look pretty darn naïve and ineffective when one of the parties simply has no interest in compromise -- and indeed sees obstruction as its primary goal.

But there's another part of the community organizing analogy that's been widely overlooked.

Community organizers take strength from the community.

They are able to bring recalcitrant parties to the negotiating table by threatening community action. They can force the hands, say, of tight-fisted landlords, by threatening rent strikes. They can bring inflexible company executives to the table by threatening, say, a picket line or a boycott.

Obama is of course no longer a community organizer. As president, there are plenty of things he can and should achieve unilaterally. And he should mostly if not entirely abandon his attempts at compromise with those who have repeatedly shown that they have no taste for it.

But some of Obama's lack of boldness may stem from the fact that when he looks behind him, there's essentially nobody there.

His legion of supporters, after rising up and sweeping him into office a year ago, basically sat their butts back down. They stood up again to cheer and cry on Inauguration Day. But then it was back to the recumbent position.

Some change -- considerable change -- came simply by virtue of Obama holding the office. There's almost no way of understating the staggering impact of his simply not being George W. Bush. That alone entitles him the thanks of a grateful nation -- not to mention the Nobel Peace Prize. Reason and facts, although not always heeded, are at least taken into consideration in this White House. We now take for granted there's a black family living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And there are a fair number of genuine accomplishments Obama can point to.

But on some key issues such as jobs, the bank bailout, the war in Afghanistan and a whole slew of executive-power related issues, Obama has fallen way short of expectations. He surrounded himself with too many people who represent politics-as-usual, and he has buckled under to pressure from the national security establishment that Bush put on steroids.

How much of that would be different, however, if the people who voted for Obama had remained politically active? If they were visibly and energetically not just supporting him, but pushing him to be bolder?

But Obama's supporters aren't giving him even rudimentary political cover.

Almost forgotten these days is the fact that in Obama's first address to Congress. In February, the new president served up a pretty darn bold agenda, backed up by a respectably progressive budget proposal. So what was the reaction? Obama looked over his shoulder and saw -- no one.

The talking heads on TV and in the newspapers tut-tutted about what a big gamble he was taking. And without any palpable expression of public support to worry about, the moneyed interests and their congressional lackeys in both parties went about nibbling everything to death.

Imagine if today Obama announced a bold and expensive new jobs program, to put America to work, build a green infrastructure, and rebuild our cities and highways. What would the reaction be? Journalists would call it radical and risky, the brayers of conventional wisdom inside the Beltway would express horror at the effects on the deficit, and the Glenn Becks of the world would work themselves into froth ranting about how Obama was building a private army of socialist storm troopers or something.

Needless to say, the overriding message wouldn't be that this was a move that had great popular support. Which it would have.

In the absence of any legitimate expression of the public will, Obama would be forced to slink back to the Oval Office, defeated and demoralized.

This is supposed to be a participatory democracy, but we've all gotten used to non-participation. And the cost is enormous.

So is there any chance of a public uprising of sorts? Any chance that the next time Obama does something bold, someone will have his back? Practically speaking, very little. For a variety of reasons, the American people have gotten out of the habit of taking public political action. And of course now we've lost nine months, during which many of Obama's most ardent supporters have become genuinely disillusioned, and many of those caught up in the enthusiasm of his campaign have simply drifted back to their traditional comfort zones.

I'll have more on this topic in the coming weeks, including what Obama could do to encourage a progressive populist movement, what areas of policy are the most likely to inspire public action, and the role of the media in narcotizing the citizenry. Stay tuned.

You can find my latest posts on this page, or you can subscribe to this RSS feed. You can also get an e-mail alert as soon as I post by creating a HuffPost Account (or logging in, if you have one already) and becoming one of my "fans". Make sure you also click on "Get Email Alerts from this Reporter" -- so that on this page, the little box next to "Notify me when a blogger I'm a fan of writes a new post" is checked. You can also follow me on Twitter, or Facebook. And I always welcome your emails at froomkin@huffingtonpost.com.

As the battle lines are drawn between the people and the bankers outside the ABA convention in Chicago, the question arises: Which side is the White House on, exactly?

Yes, the Obama administration is pushing to dramatically increase the regulation of consumer and other financial transactions that have run amok, but there is widespread concern from across the political spectrum that the White House is neither going far enough nor fighting hard enough. And time and again -- most notably with the ongoing $700 billion bailout -- Obama administration policies have put the interests of bankers and Wall Street ahead of those of impoverished families, unemployed workers or underwater homeowners.

One reason -- which has never been directly addressed by Obama -- may be that many of his chief financial advisers have pocketed extraordinary amount of money from banks and Wall Street, and presumably intend to do so again. They are part of the banker class, and their loyalties have been bought and paid for.

Back in April, when the White House released financial disclosure forms late one Friday, those few people paying attention learned just how stupendously beholden Obama's top economic adviser, Larry Summers, is to the financial industry that he is ostensibly trying to rein in.

Summers was paid $5.2 million for his part-time work for a massive hedge fund in 2008. He also took in more than $2.7 million in fees for speaking engagements at such places as Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs -- including one visit alone that netted him $135,000 from Goldman Sachs.

That's right: $135,000 for one visit on one day. You can't pocket that kind of money and not be, on some level, corrupted.

Similarly, deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs Michael Froman received $7.4 million from Citigroup between January 2008 and January 2009 -- including a year-end bonus of $2.25 million that he received just days before coming to work at the White House for a man who was at that very moment calling just such bonuses "shameful".

And earlier this month, Bloomberg's Robert Schmidt significantly added to our understanding of just how co-opted Obama's financial team is by examining the financial disclosure forms of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's closest aides.

The advisers include Gene Sperling, who last year took in $887,727 from Goldman Sachs and $158,000 for speeches mostly to financial companies, including the firm run by accused Ponzi scheme mastermind R. Allen Stanford.

Another top aide, Lee Sachs, reported more than $3 million in salary and partnership income from Mariner Investment Group, a New York hedge fund.

Sachs, who joined Treasury in January, reported in February that he was still owed a 2008 bonus whose value was "not ascertainable." I wonder how that one turned out.

Also in Geithner's inner circle, according to Schmidt: "counselor Lewis Alexander, the former chief economist at Citigroup; Chief of Staff Mark Patterson, who was a lobbyist at Goldman Sachs, and Matthew Kabaker, a deputy assistant secretary who worked at private equity firm."

Alexander was paid $2.4 million in 2008 and the first few months of 2009 by Citigroup; Kabaker earned $5.8 million working on private equity deals at Blackstone in 2008 and 2009.

Patterson, Geithner's chief of staff, was a registered lobbyist for Goldman Sachs before joining the Obama campaign, and took in what seemed at first glance to be a relatively modest-by-Goldman-standards salary of $637,230 in 2008. But it turns out that was only for three months' work -- he left Goldman in early April.

All this money makes Obama's top financial advisors veritable poster boys for the Wall Street culture that the president in his speeches has publicly decried as a "house of cards" and a "Ponzi scheme" in which "a relatively few do spectacularly well while the middle class loses ground".

I'm not doubting the smarts of Obama's financial team -- but I do feel that the vast majority of people who take the kind of money we're talking about here can't help but be warped by it, and that in choosing to cash in, they essentially disqualified themselves from public service.

Unless they are willing to assertively act in ways that redeem themselves and show that their allegiances have not been purchased, they should step down and make way for people who see the people's side of things a little more clearly.

You can find my latest posts on this page, or you can subscribe to this RSS feed. You can also get an e-mail alert as soon as I post by creating a HuffPost Account (or logging in, if you have one already) and becoming one of my "fans". Make sure you also click on "Get Email Alerts from this Reporter" -- so that on this page, the little box next to "Notify me when a blogger I'm a fan of writes a new post" is checked. You can also follow me on Twitter, or Facebook. And I always welcome your emails at froomkin@huffingtonpost.com.

The Obama administration's recent characterization of Fox News is a long overdue acknowledgment of the obvious: Fox News is not a legitimate news organization -- indeed, after many years of serving as the research and messaging wing of the Republican Party, it has now gone beyond even that, to become the electronic evangelist of an ultra-partisan and non-reality-based world view.

Historically speaking, White House criticism of the media has often been unseemly and defensive, with the president's ire generally provoked by journalists who excel at their work -- by asking cheeky questions, exposing important things that the president would prefer be kept secret, holding the powerful accountable and playing host to a vibrant and informed exchange of a wide range of political opinions.

But in this case, the critique is something else entirely. The litmus test is that the Obama White House is not upset at news gatherers for doing their job. What Obama and his aides are correctly pointing out is that the people working at Fox News are doing another job altogether.

The White House "attack" on Fox is being derided as bad politics, as ineffective and as a distraction from more important issues -- all of which may be true. But doesn't it kind of matter that, when it comes to the substance of what Anita Dunn, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, and now even Obama himself have said, they're exactly right?

Obama on Wednesday told NBC's Savannah Guthrie: "I think that what our advisers have simply said is, is that we are going to take media as it comes. And if media is operating basically as a talk radio format, then that's one thing. And if it's operating as a news outlet, then that's another. "

Fox News has, as my colleague Jason Linkins so effectively wrote earlier this week, well and truly left the fold of legitimate news outlets. The evidence is exhaustive. If you actually watch the network, it's not a close question. Indeed, as Josh Marshall writes, "as a product the straight news is almost more the stuff of parody than the talk shows which are at least more or less straightforward about what they are."

Pretending that Fox News is fair and balanced only serves the right wing, in the same way that it only served the Bush administration when traditional-media reporters pretended Bush didn't have a credibility problem -- and didn't call him out for his lies -- for fear of appearing partisan. It's self-muzzling, plain and simple.

One of the startling shifts in the last decade has been how so many of the most important policy issues of our time have become matters not of honest political debate, but of competing realities (only one of which, mind you, is supported by facts.) During the Bush years, whether it was related to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, progress in Iraq, torture, or tax cuts for the rich, Bush and his acolytes operated in their own fictional world -- with the traditional media only rarely issuing a reality check.

I was confident that the alternate-reality dynamic would dissipate with Bush out of office. But in fact it has rebooted -- and has come back stronger than ever -- with Fox's opinioneers and their only slightly more news-like enablers at the lead, creating a rich alternate universe full of foreign-born presidents, socialists and conspiracies to destroy the American way of life.

Allowing that kind of conduct to be called "news" does real news a tremendous disservice. And for those trying to restore a more reality-based political debate, calling Fox News out is a crucial step in counteracting or containing its noxious effect on the political climate.

Washington Post opinion columnist Ruth Marcus, who this week predictably and enthusiastically joined the inside-the-Beltway hyperventilating about the White House's "dumb" decision to describe Fox accurately, then tried to use something I wrote last year about an incident of White House media criticism from the Bush years in her defense.

Marcus's initial argument included this assertion: "Imagine the outcry if the Bush administration had pulled a similar hissy fit with MSNBC." Then, after being deluged by commenters, Marcus cited me, at the time writing an online column about the White House for the Washington Post, as evidence that the media did appropriately call the Bush administration out when he had the gall to engage in media criticism himself.

But the difference in scale is laughable. We're talking about the nearly lone protestations of one marginalized blogger in one case -- compared to the massive media scrum now, which shows no sign of letting up, and in which reaction has mostly ranged from tut-tutting aimed at the White House to full-throated conspiracy theories about a new Nixon era, even from people who should know better.

Furthermore, looking back at the details of that particular incident from the Bush years is instructive, because Bush's beef was with a journalist who happened to be doing his job with unusual integrity and fearlessness.

Here's the column in question: The President Vs. the Peacock, from back in May of 2008.

The ostensible cause of the complaint by Bush counselor Ed Gillespie to NBC was that the edited version of an interview between Bush and NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel had been unfairly truncated, when compared to the full interview. Here's the text.

But, as I wrote at the time:

NBC's handling of the interview was not atypical for a tightly-edited broadcast and did not violate any journalistic norms. The White House may believe that news outlets are obliged to reproduce all of Bush's non-answers in their rambling entirety, but that's not the way the news business works....

"The White House's outsized reaction instead appears to be about two other things entirely.

It doesn't take a trained psychologist to observe that Bush got angrier and angrier as the Engel interview went on....

Bush typically sits down with interviewers from Fox News -- or, more recently, Politico -- where he can count on more than his share of ingratiating softballs. But Engel, a fluent Arabic speaker who has logged more time in Iraq than any other television correspondent, assertively confronted Bush with the ramifications of his actions in the Middle East.

For instance, Engel noted: "A lot of Iran's empowerment is a result of the war in Iraq." He questioned Bush about his lack of an exit strategy in Iraq: "So it doesn't sound like there's an end anytime soon." He clearly upset Bush by saying that "on the ground," the situation in Iraq "looks very bleak." (Bush replied: "Well, that's interesting you said that -- that's a little different from the surveys I've seen and a little different from the attitude of the actual Iraqis I've talked to, but you're entitled to your opinion.")

He also challenged Bush on his legacy: "[I]f you look back over the last several years, the Middle East that you'll be handing over to the next President is deeply problematic: You have Hamas in power; Hezbollah empowered, taking to the streets, more -- stronger than the government; Iran empowered, Iraq still at war. What region are you handing over?"

And Bush seemed positively furious by the end of the interview, when Engel had this to say: "The war on terrorism has been the centerpiece of your presidency. Many people say that it has not made the world safer, that it has created more radicals. That there are more people in this part of the world who want to attack the United States."

Get it? The difference here is that everything Engel said was true. He was doing his job very well indeed -- with a rare amount of courage. That was his big "mistake" in the eyes of the White House -- speaking the truth to the president.

The latest news, from the New York Times is that: "In a sign of discomfort with the White House stance, Fox's television news competitors refused to go along with a Treasury Department effort on Tuesday to exclude Fox from a round of interviews with the executive-pay czar Kenneth R. Feinberg that was to be conducted with a 'pool' camera crew shared by all the networks."

But for Washington's real journalists to rush to the defense of Fox News would be extremely short-sighted, and yet another dismal example of inside-the-Beltway camaraderie run amok. Sure, some of these people may be our friends -- and there are a few journalists at Fox who have maintained a modicum of integrity -- but the fact is that overall, these are people who have made a conscious decision to get out of the truth business. They don't deserve our support -- or our silence about what they really are.

You can find my latest posts on this page, or you can subscribe to this RSS feed. You can also get an e-mail alert as soon as I post by creating a HuffPost Account (or logging in, if you have one already) and becoming one of my "fans". Make sure you also click on "Get Email Alerts from this Reporter" -- so that on this page, the little box next to "Notify me when a blogger I'm a fan of writes a new post" is checked. You can also follow me on Twitter, or Facebook. And I always welcome your emails at froomkin@huffingtonpost.com.

Nowhere is the massive disconnect between Washington D.C. and the rest of the country more striking than when it comes to the issue of jobs.

Inside Washington, it is almost universally considered a foregone conclusion that unemployment will remain near, at, or even above 10 percent -- not just for months, but for years to come. (The unemployment rate in September, we just found out this morning, ticked up yet again, to 9.8 percent.) As White House economic guru Larry Summers dispassionately told reporters last month (while otherwise taking credit for turning the economy around), "The level of unemployment is unacceptably high and will on all forecasts remain unacceptably high for a number of, for a number of years."

This situation creates no sense of urgency in Washington. Ask Summers what he's going to do about it, for instance, and he hems and haws about recovery act programs that have yet to take full effect. To our political elite, jobs are simply nowhere near as critical an issue as the other economic indicators, the stock market, or the financial health of the nation's top bankers.

Outside the Beltway, however, it's a different story. According to a new poll by Hart Research Associates for the Economic Policy Institute, unemployment and the lack of jobs "remains the dominant problem on the economic agenda for voters across party lines." In fact, it's not even close. Asked to name the most important economic problem facing the country, registered voters cited unemployment twice as often as they mentioned the deficit or even the cost of health care; and four times as much as the housing crisis or problems with the banking system.

A whopping 83 percent see unemployment as either a fairly big or very big problem; and 81 percent say the Obama administration hasn't done enough to deal with it.

And there just aren't a whole lot of things that more than 80 percent of Americans agree about.

Not coincidentally, large majorities of voters also see the government's economic policies as helping banks and Wall Street -- while few see themselves or average working families in general as benefiting.

So why isn't political Washington fully engaged in addressing the unemployment problem? For the same reasons it can't seem to get much of anything done these days: most notably the abject lack of boldness from the Democrats and persistent obstructionism from the Republicans.

Democrats have been particularly terrified for decades now of doing anything that can be said to actually cost the government money. (Republicans, ironically, have no such scruples.) So our modern ruling party has found itself boxed in by its own president's support for "pay-as-you-go budget rules". And the fact is that very serious concern about the deficit -- even now, when it's the least of our troubles -- is considered a hallmark of serious thinking in Washington. Those who don't toe the line are written off as crazy, wild-eyed radicals.

There are, of course, lots of ways Washington could affirmatively and effectively create jobs in short order -- if the political will were there. Direct jobs programs are the most obvious way, but reduced unemployment could also be achieved by increasing pass-through payments to the states, creating new tax incentives for boosting staff, or appropriating more money for infrastructure and environmental programs that would, in turn, lead to private-sector hiring.

New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman writes today, warning of Washington complacency:

[A]ll indications are that unless the government does much more than is currently planned to help the economy recover, the job market -- a market in which there are currently six times as many people seeking work as there are jobs on offer -- will remain terrible for years to come.....

[C]an we afford to do more -- to provide more aid to beleaguered state governments and the unemployed, to spend more on infrastructure, to provide tax credits to employers who create jobs?
Yes, we can.

The conventional wisdom is that trying to help the economy now produces short-term gain at the expense of long-term pain. But ... from the point of view of the nation as a whole that's not at all how it works. The slump is doing long-term damage to our economy and society, and mitigating that slump will lead to a better future.

And former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich is also blunt, writing in his Huffington Post blog:

Who's going to buy the stuff we make or the services we provide, and therefore bring jobs back? There's only one buyer left: The government.

Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.

Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.

But the political will simply doesn't exist. And that's a tragedy. Because the gigantic production shortfall that continues to afflict our nation is not abstract. It is made up of people -- people who are out of work, families who are losing their homes and health insurance, young people who are dropping out of college and children who are going hungry. This is the real drama of modern American life, barely registering in Washington where what matters most is political consequences -- and where the bigger danger, for now, is seen in action than in inaction.

But inaction will have consequences, too, and they could be severe. As Reich astutely warns:

Unemployment of this magnitude and duration also translates into ugly politics, because fear and anxiety are fertile grounds for demagogues wielding the politics of resentment against immigrants, blacks, the poor, government leaders, business leaders, Jews, and other easy targets. It's already started. Next year is a mid-term election. Be prepared for worse.

Maybe it was the spectacle of all those discredited neocons gathering in Washington to urge him to stay the course in Afghanistan. Or maybe it was the endless nagging from Vice President Biden.

But for whatever reason, President Obama is suddenly said to be rethinking his approach to that benighted country -- possibly even considering Biden's proposal to withdraw troops currently engaged in counter-insurgency and nation-building, and instead focus on counter-terrorism there and in Pakistan.

Should Obama actually change his mind about Afghanistan, our elite journalists -- obsessed as they are with how the game is played -- will almost inevitably characterize this as vacillation and declare it a sign of political weakness. But that really misses the point.

The most important thing to keep in mind here is that over the last several months, what's emerged when it comes to Afghan policy is a sort of consensus of the realists -- from across the political spectrum. The consensus: That our national interests in Afghanistan are pretty limited and that the harder we try to change things over there, the more resistance we face; that Afghanistan, after eight years of U.S. occupation, has become a Vietnam-like quagmire where escalation only leads to more escalation, not victory; and that what little we could possibly accomplish there is not worth more American blood.

Pretty much the only people left supporting a massive sustained military approach (no matter how cleverly retooled) are the neocons, the reflexive Obama supporters, and the military commanders charged with carrying it out. Otherwise, a wide swath of experts and politicians -- not to mention a significant majority of the American public -- have concluded that our interests are best served at this point by getting out and certainly not by sending more troops in.

If Obama does change his mind, that will indeed be newsworthy -- but not in a way that reflects poorly on his leadership. We should be more skeptical of a president who never changes his mind than of one who does on occasion, particularly when they're faced with new or overwhelming evidence. What I've particularly craved after eight years of Bush is a president with the ability to admit mistakes. It was an auspicious sign when, less than two weeks into his presidency, Obama publicly and forthrightly admitted he had "screwed up" in nominating two people with tax problems to key positions in his administration.
Since then I've been way more concerned about his inability to cop to subsequent screw-ups than I have been about indecisiveness. I've been particularly alarmed by his inability to express much remorse for the civilian casualties that have been the byproducts of his war. So let's be clear: Changing your mind when you've been wrong is a good thing, not a bad thing; it's a sign of strength, not of weakness.

The most troubling question an Obama change of mind would raise is why he advocated such a bombastic approach to Afghanistan in the first place, starting back when he was campaigning for office. What didn't he understand at the time? Was he getting bad advice? Or was it a purely political stratagem to insulate him from being attacked as a peacenik? If so, at what cost? And whose cost? And why did he actually up the rhetorical ante less than two months ago, telling the Veterans of Foreign Wars that this was a "war of necessity"? Yes, the recent Afghan elections, marked by widespread fraud, produced powerful evidence that there will be no strong, reliable central government in that country anytime in the foreseeable future. But was that really the inflection point? So if Obama changes course, we should well ask: What took him so long?

Another important thing that could happen here is that, by fully explaining his decision, Obama could go a long way toward restoring a balanced and rational sense of what it means to "support the troops." Former president George W. Bush and his political henchmen used that phrase as a bludgeon to beat Democrats into submission on any issue even vaguely related to national security -- even when it actually resulted in putting the troops in greater danger. Most notably, Bush insisted that once troops had been committed to Iraq, he bore the responsibility to make sure they had not died in vain -- and that anything short of victory would be a betrayal of those soldiers who had already made the ultimate sacrifice. Democrats were way too terrified to demand a pullout from Iraq, even when they controlled Congress, for fear of being accused of undercutting our brave fighting men and women.

But the fact is that our modern-age all-volunteer army -- and its do-or-die commanders -- simply can't be relied upon to decide what's best for themselves. They're just not the kind of people to whine, not to mention admit that they can't accomplish the tasks they've been charged with. Sometimes removing them from the field of battle is the best thing a commander in chief can do for the troops - and that's certainly the case if the alternative is to send even more to give their lives for a lost cause. "Do or die" is a glorious motto for warriors, but for their civilian leaders, it would be nice to have another alternative -- particularly when the "do" can't be done.

And one last thing to keep in mind is that Obama's Afghan plan has been missing something hugely important all along: an exit strategy. The plan itself has been vague and open-ended -- and there's been no accounting for what happens if things don't go according to plan. It took the administration until last week to give members of Congress a first look at its proposed "benchmarks" for success, and early reports were not encouraging. And the recent precedent with benchmarks is not good. The Bush administration grudgingly set ambiguous benchmarks for Iraq - then made a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument: To the extent that we were meeting them, that was a validation for our presence; to the extent that we weren't, that meant we needed to try even harder. For benchmarks to really mean something, they should serve as clearly identifiable indicators not simply of improvements here or there - but of whether our fundamental goals are in fact attainable. Because if our goals are not attainable, then obviously we should get out of there even faster.

Is Obama really changing his mind about his approach to Afghanistan? Does he have it in him? We don't yet know for certain. But if he does decide to face reality, that's something many of us should celebrate rather than criticize. Facing reality, no matter how ugly that reality is, is always better than the alternative.

A message from Dan about how to find me: I'm not writing every day anymore -- I've got a lot of other things to do in my new job as Washington Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post. But there are lots of ways to keep track of my work! You can always find my latest posts on this page, or you can subscribe to this RSS feed. You can also get an e-mail alert as soon as I post by creating a HuffPost Account (or logging in, if you have one already) and becoming one of my "fans". Make sure you also click on "Get Email Alerts from this Reporter" -- so that on this page, the little box next to "Notify me when a blogger I'm a fan of writes a new post" is checked. You can also follow me on Twitter, or Facebook. And I always welcome your emails at froomkin@huffingtonpost.com.

Ever since the economy crashed and the government paid hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the fat-cats who were responsible, a populist rage has been seething away across the country.

Home values have collapsed, more than two million homes have been foreclosed on, retirement nest eggs are decimated, seven million jobs have been lost. Hard-won feelings of financial security now seem like a distant memory. The economy is turning around, they say, but where are the jobs? And what about all the money that's been lost?

Meanwhile, not only have the bankers and Wall Street financiers who caused this mess avoided accountability, they've actually been rewarded -- the biggest among them being told that no matter what they do, they can buy their way out of trouble with a seemingly endless supply of taxpayer dollars.

This summer, we've seen one possible pathway for the nation's angry populism -- one that exhibits many of the worst behaviors of disgruntled Americans throughout history. The birthers, deathers, town hallers and tea-baggers are paranoid and irrational and more than a little racist. They're also being cynically used by corporate-funded demagogues who are lining their own pockets as well as those of their masters. As Tom Edsall reported for the Huffington Post this week, this is all giving the GOP high hopes for 2010.

But as the nation heads into a spirited debate over the proper role of financial regulation in the coming weeks, the formidable resentments of the American middle class -- for whom the crash was basically a big exclamation point after three decades of downward mobility -- could also be channeled in a more constructive and hopeful direction.

It's self-evident to pretty much everyone not on Wall Street or Capitol Hill that the nation's financial laws need some serious reform, particularly when it comes to corporate governance, reining in outrageous bonuses and salaries, adopting rules that stop fat-cats from taking dangerously overleveraged risks with the taxpayers as their backstop, and protecting the consumer from deceptive practices. The meting out of a little punishment to the irresponsibly greedy wouldn't hurt, either.

All of which makes the time ripe for a grassroots reform movement.

But one thing that's become abundantly clear during the health-care debate is that you can't count on President Obama to lead a populist revolt. His impulse is to find common ground, not grab a pitchfork, and that's especially true when it comes to his approach to people who make a lot of money. And even if he wanted to, his credibility to lead such a movement has been terribly undermined by his role in bailing out the banks and the big auto companies.

So who will lead? And how many people will join in?

When it comes to moving aggressive financial regulation through Capitol Hill, a pro-reform grassroots movement is going to have be enormously successful indeed to offset the extraordinary lobbying muscle of the banks who, as Senator Dick Durbin so famously said, own the place. Without hearing an awful lot of threats from constituents, swing votes -- particularly the so-called "moderate" Democrats -- are likely to find the possible loss of financial support from their banker bankrollers considerably more terrifying than a few angry voters.

President Obama showed the nation who he is and what he believes in last night.

His speech to a joint session of Congress wasn't the partisan declaration of war that many of his fellow Democrats had been yearning for, but it was nevertheless a bold and confident declaration of basic principles, and a powerful and emotional attempt to recapture the public debate from the unhinged zealots who dominated it during August.

What is now more obvious than ever is that Obama is not a traditional liberal. Yes, he shares a lot of liberal values -- and he expressed that more clearly and passionately last night than perhaps ever before -- but when push comes to shove, he cares more about finding common ground than pretty much anything else. Despite all the calls to issue an ultimatum about the public option -- which seems absolutely critical to achieving fundamental change -- Obama simply will not draw lines in the sand. He still wants to get as many people into the tent as possible.

The speech did mark a turning point, however. The president we saw last night was not the high-minded pushover we'd seen so much of lately. He was inspirational, forceful -- presidential. The ending of his speech was one for the ages:

We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it. I still believe we can act even when it's hard. I still believe we can replace acrimony with civility, and gridlock with progress. I still believe we can do great things, and that here and now we will meet history's test. Because that is who we are. That is our calling. That is our character.

And to his great credit, Obama robustly addressed what had been the biggest flaw of his strategy so far. The problem with his consensus-building, community-organizer approach to making policy -- whether you like it or not -- is that it simply doesn't work if there isn't even an agreement about basic facts, or if some of the people in the room aren't negotiating in good faith. And on this topic, Obama came out fighting:

Some of people's concerns have grown out of bogus claims spread by those whose only agenda is to kill reform at any cost. The best example is the claim made not just by radio and cable talk show hosts, but by prominent politicians, that we plan to set up panels of bureaucrats with the power to kill off senior citizens. Now, such a charge would be laughable if it weren't so cynical and irresponsible. It is a lie, plain and simple.

Later, he added:

I will continue to seek common ground in the weeks ahead.... But know this: I will not waste time with those who have made the calculation that it's better politics to kill this plan than to improve it. I won't stand by while the special interests use the same old tactics to keep things exactly the way they are. If you misrepresent what's in this plan, we will call you out.

He was particularly feisty when it came to beating back the "demagoguery and distortion during the course of this debate" related to Medicare. "[D]on't pay attention to those scary stories about how your benefits will be cut," he said -- "especially since some of the same folks who are spreading these tall tales have fought against Medicare in the past and just this year supported a budget that would essentially have turned Medicare into a privatized voucher program."

Even as he fought back against the misinformation campaigns from the right, however, Obama refused to demonize Republicans generally. They didn't return the favor, of course, greeting his speech with boos and antics -- and in one congressman's case, screaming "You lie!" after Obama denied that his health care proposal would cover illegal immigrants. But on one level, it's a smart strategy for Obama. His goal, after all, is not to eliminate the opposition -- it's simply to get them to occupy reality. Perhaps by keeping an open hand, he can still lure a few of them into that tent of his -- or at least get credit for trying. Your average non-crazy Republican voter might even appreciate it.

Obama most definitely did not do what many of us had called upon him to do, and that was come down firmly on one side or the other regarding the public option. As it turns out, that's just not in his DNA. At least he was explicit about what the public option really means, explaining: "I have no interest in putting insurance companies out of business.... I just want to hold them accountable." And he did issue an ultimatum of sorts, saying: "I will not back down on the basic principle that if Americans can't find affordable coverage, we will provide you with a choice."

It's just that we still have no idea what specific proposals he will ultimately conclude satisfy that basic principle -- or how he will reach that conclusion. And there's reason to worry. For instance, last night he continued to describe the proposal that such an option be administered by "a co-op or another non-profit entity" as a "constructive idea" -- even though it is, by almost all accounts, a laughably preposterous and incoherent one.

The public option is right there in black and white in the very interesting document the White House Web-published simultaneously with the speech. "The Obama Plan":

Offers a public health insurance option to provide the uninsured and those who can't find affordable coverage with a real choice. The President believes this option will promote competition, hold insurance companies accountable and assure affordable choices. It is completely voluntary.

But in a conference call with bloggers after the speech, White House spokesman Dan Pfeiffer was unable to say which bullet points in the plan as published might be negotiable, and which might not. "The principles the president laid out in the plan are not negotiable," Pfeiffer said. He just wouldn't say as much for any of the specifics. (He also said the White House has not decided yet whether to send its own version of the bill to the Hill, rather than try to work with the versions emerging from the five different congressional committees.)

And one very important thing was entirely missing from Obama's speech: Any explanation of what he's been up to in his backroom deals with health industry titans. This demonstrated a real lack of transparency, honesty, and courage on Obama's part, and until he addresses this issue full-on, the man continues to have a not inconsiderable credibility problem.

The biggest challenge for Obama at this point, however, is the press. Will his speech be a game-changer as far as the coverage is concerned? Last night's triumphant visuals, including wildly cheering Democrats, and the resulting instapolls certainly proved a change of pace from the angry town-halls and barrage of lunacy that so transfixed our elite reporters during August. But the question is actually less whether the tenor of the coverage will change than whether the media will take this occasion to engage -- even just a little bit -- in a serious examination of the issues. Chances are, of course, that the vast majority of the coverage will continue to focus obsessively on politics and process -- and on the next conflict, the next gun-toting whacko, and the next spectacular bit of disinformation. That wouldn't be good for Obama -- or for the nation.

As it happens, however, there is some great drama worth covering right in the policy arena. Will the more widely acceptable bill that appears likely to emerge from this newly refocused White House effort actually be the best one possible? Or will the cost of having more people in the tent -- particularly the industry titans -- be ruinously high? Does compromise in this case lead to splitting the baby?

There is still the distinct possibility that what will emerge from Obama's common ground will be a bill that allows health costs to continue to skyrocket, that forces people to buy terribly overpriced insurance they can't afford, that leaves insurance companies essentially unaccountable, and that ultimately serves as a massive subsidy to the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, with the bill going to our grandchildren. That's pretty dramatic stuff. Maybe worth a few minutes on CNN?

A message from Dan about how to find me: I'm not writing every day anymore - I've got a lot of other things to do in my new job as Washington Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post. But there are lots of ways to keep track of my work! You can always find my latest posts on this page, or you can subscribe to this RSS feed. You can also get an e-mail alert as soon as I post by creating a HuffPost Account (or logging in, if you have one already) and becoming one of my "fans". Make sure you also click on "Get Email Alerts from this Reporter" -- so that on this page, the little box next to "Notify me when a blogger I'm a fan of writes a new post" is checked. You can also follow me on Twitter, or Facebook. And I always welcome your emails at froomkin@huffingtonpost.com.

The nation needs to see a different President Obama next Wednesday when he addresses a joint session of Congress.

His laid-back attempt to take the high road just isn't working.

It was all very noble and everything to try to be bipartisan. It was most excellently un-Bush-like to actually ask Congress to try its hand at legislating. It was admirably high-minded to attempt conciliation, to adopt a professorial role, and stay at 30,000 feet.

But no more. The Republican Party and the national discourse have been hijacked by unhinged zealots. The Democratic congressional leadership has shown itself to be incoherent, incapable and corrupted. So for Obama, it's either time to fight back or give up.

Obama could, I guess, back off on everything remotely controversial in his health care proposal, throw the public option and universal coverage and end-of-life counseling overboard, and try to get everyone to find common ground. But even that wouldn't appease his critics. They won't stop fighting just because he does. Their goal is for Obama to lose.

Alternately, Obama could commit himself to some specifics, call out his critics, and remind people why all this is so damned important.

Here's one thing he could say: I'm not going to chase after the crazies on the right anymore. I cannot do business with these people, try as I may. I reach out and they accuse me of being a socialist who wants to pull the plug on grandma.

He could bolster this argument with nearly endless examples of the extreme, vitriolic and outright balmy things leading Republicans have been saying about him and his plan lately. Heck, just yesterday, Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe told a town hall audience that Obama is disarming the military, is destroying everything good about America and is determined to turn foreign terrorists loose on U.S. soil.

Non-fire-breathing Washington Post business columnist Steven Pearlstein actually understated the case earlier this month, when he could finally take it no more and wrote:

The recent attacks by Republican leaders and their ideological fellow-travelers on the effort to reform the health-care system have been so misleading, so disingenuous, that they could only spring from a cynical effort to gain partisan political advantage. By poisoning the political well, they've given up any pretense of being the loyal opposition. They've become political terrorists, willing to say or do anything to prevent the country from reaching a consensus on one of its most serious domestic problems.

(Incidentally, one way for Obama to elegantly back away from his vain attempt to elicit something bipartisan from the Senate Finance Committee's "Gang of Six" would be to focus attention on the thus-far largely ignored Senate health committee version of the bill.)

In terms of committing to specifics, Obama simply has no choice but to come down firmly on one side or the other regarding the public option.

He needs to explain precisely what the public option is and is not -- how it is not a government takeover of health care or even a government-run health care program, but rather a government-run insurance option that would provide an alternative to the private sector, solely for those individuals or small businesses who either don't have insurance now or want to find a better deal.

And if he decides to sacrifice the public option, he needs to explain both why he is doing that, and how, in its absence, there will be any accountability at all for the insurance industry.

He also needs to honestly and directly address the issue of how we're going to pay for all this. And if he's still committed to his original proposal to limit itemized tax deductions for the nation's highest earners to the same level they were during the Reagan years -- a proposal that Democrats in Congress called dead on arrival -- he needs to aggressively make his case and begin stiffening some of those Democratic spines.

And he needs to openly address the deals he has made with Big Pharma and other industry players. What were his intentions? What did he promise? What did he give up? Are the deals still in force? How does he think he can bridge the chasm between the interests of the health industry on one side and the American public on the other? Because he really can't. So who is going to take the haircut? Whose side is Obama really on?

And finally, Obama needs to remind people of the stakes -- of the reality that his batty critics simply can't deal with, a reality that is way scarier than "death panels." It's a reality in which millions of Americans can't afford to see a doctor when they're sick; in which people can't get insurance because they've been sick in the past; in which people get their coverage rescinded just when they need it; in which people lose insurance because they lost their jobs; in which people go bankrupt and lose their homes to pay their medical bills; in which people die -- yes, die -- because they can't afford the treatment they need, or their insurance carriers won't pay for it.

To some extent, I understand why Obama hasn't taken a more aggressive approach until now. After all, the nativist right is ready to pounce the minute he gives them a video clip that allows them to depict him as an "angry black man." But they'll pounce anyway. They've already pounced. They'll keep pouncing no matter what.

And in any case, Obama doesn't have to actually get angry. All he has to do is level with us, tell us exactly where he stands, and propose a clear, detailed way out of this mess.

A message from Dan about how to find me: I'm not writing every day anymore - I've got a lot of other things to do in my new job as Washington Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post. But there are lots of ways to keep track of my work! You can always find my latest posts on this page, or you can subscribe to this RSS feed. You can also get an e-mail alert as soon as I post by creating a HuffPost Account (or logging in, if you have one already) and becoming one of my "fans". Make sure you also click on "Get Email Alerts from this Reporter" -- so that on this page, the little box next to "Notify me when a blogger I'm a fan of writes a new post" is checked. You can also follow me on Twitter, or Facebook. And I always welcome your emails at froomkin@huffingtonpost.com.

When he was vice president, Dick Cheney got his way by secretly wielding the instruments of power. Now that he's no longer in government, Cheney is still pulling levers and pushing buttons - he's just doing it in plain view. And it's the media that he's manipulating.

After years of speaking in whispers, operating by proxy, and leaving as few fingerprints as possible, Cheney has figured out that he can say pretty much anything he wants, the networks will show it on TV, and the newspapers will dutifully print it. And best of all, they will fail to put it in any context whatsoever.

The first bit of context for any Cheney comment, of course, is that he is a monstrous liar. News articles about Cheney should routinely reminded readers of some of the things he said in the run-up to war in Iraq. Like, for instance: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." By any reasonable standard, this man's credibility was shot a long time ago.

Cheney's latest coup is to get the media to obediently recount what Rachel L. Swarns of the New York Times so naively and euphemistically called his "forceful defense of the full range of interrogation techniques used by intelligence officers."

In an interview with beyond-obsequious Fox News anchor Chris Wallace that aired on Sunday, Cheney once again alleged that what he calls "enhanced interrogation tactics" saved "thousands of lives and let us defeat all further attacks against the United States."

It wouldn't have been hard for reporters to put that particular claim in its proper context. Just last week, the CIA released two documents that Cheney had been huffing and puffing (and bluffing) about for months, insisting that they would once and for all definitively prove that torture had, as he put it, "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people."

But just as we critics expected, when those reports were released, they included no such proof -- just a lot of cover-your-ass language from the CIA, vaguely describing intelligence findings gained from the overall interrogation of "high value detainees" generally speaking. There was no evidence that a single American life was saved, or of any valuable intelligence that couldn't have been gathered using traditional methods.

In fact, after all these years, and despite a slew of selective leaks while Cheney was still in power, there remains not one iota of proof that torture accomplished much of anything -- not that it would be OK if it had.

All we know for sure is that torture is still excellent at producing false confessions, just like it was designed to do.

Cheney also criticized Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to launch an extremely limited preliminary review into whether crimes were committed by the handful of interrogators who far exceeded even the Bush DOJ's patently illegal guidelines. Last week, I called this At Best, A Baby Step Toward Justice For Bush's Torturers. But Cheney, in his Fox interview, said the review "offends the hell out of me, frankly." He explained: "[W]e had a track record now of eight years of defending the nation against any further mass casualty attacks from Al Qaeda. The approach of the Obama administration should be to come to those people who were involved in that policy and say, how did you do it? What were the keys to keeping this country safe over that period of time? "

Any normal person -- or reasonable journalist -- would gasp at Cheney's spectacular gall, and marvel at his absolutism. (He even went so far as to say that the conduct being investigated, which includes threatening detainees with a drill, a gun, and the rape of family members to be "OK" by him.) But instead, the coverage was restrained, if not respectful.

And Cheney lied some more, in case anyone was looking for fresh evidence of his mendacity. Asked how much he knew about what the CIA was doing, Cheney replied: "I knew about the waterboarding. Not specifically in any one particular case, but as a general policy that we had approved."

This is a laughably blatant falsehood from the man who was, by many reliable accounts, the chief choreographer of the program, up to his elbows in gory details.

As ABC News reported in April 2008, for instance, top Bush aides including Cheney met in the White House basement to micromanage the application of waterboarding and other torture techniques starting immediately after the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, the low-level al Qaeda operative whose false confessions sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators chasing after imaginary threats. ABC reported that the CIA briefed the White House group on its plans to use aggressive techniques against Zubaydah and received explicit approval. Indeed, some interrogation sessions were virtually choreographed by the group.

And as blogger Marcy Wheeler points out, Cheney also mischaracterized what President Obama has previously said about who might or might not be prosecuted.

So what is Cheney's goal in all of this? I think Obsidian Wings blogger publius nails a big chunk of it, writing:

[H]e wants to politicize the torture debate as much as possible -- to transform a profound debate about our country's values into just another everyday Republican/Democratic partisan squabble that makes people throw up their hands and despair of knowing "the truth."

If you've noticed, Cheney tends to pop up in the aftermath of damning evidence. We just (re)learned, for instance, that our CIA agents murdered detainees, choked them, and threatened to rape their wives. Normally, you would think these revelations would give pause to even the most ardent Cheney supporters.

But then Cheney comes along, and tries to reframe the whole story. His intended audience isn't the nation as a whole, but conservatives. He wants to make sure that they view these stories through partisan-tinted lenses.

Indeed, muddying the debate was one of the most effective Bush-era communication tactics.

But Cheney has some other obvious motives, as well. As I wrote in May, there's also the small matter of his understandably strong desire to avoid investigation or prosecution -- and ignominy in the history books. After all, the best defense is a good offense.

Meanwhile, Cheney is still operating in the shadows, as well. Indeed, it's impossible not to see him (by proxy) behind what must have been, for him, an extraordinary coup: A front-page Washington Post story on Saturday chock full of anonymous sources implicitly validating his view of torture as a great tongue-loosener, despite the lack of any supporting evidence - and with nothing said about all the lies they uttered while being tortured.

When it comes to the Bush torture regime, President Obama famously wants to look forward, not backward. But if the wrong lessons have been learned, the view ahead is bleak.

Nothing less than our country's moral standing is at stake. More than 50 years after the Nuremberg Trials, are we really prepared to assert as a nation that "just following orders" is an acceptable defense for gross violations of human rights? And what about accountability for the people who issued those terrible orders - and who fabricated their ostensible legal justifications?

Because here's the thing: Should the government's response to the repeated, systemic abuse of detainees after 9/11 end with the excessively circumscribed investigation described by Attorney General Eric Holder yesterday, a terrible precedent will have been set. The message for future federal employees faced with morally suspect orders will be clear: Do what you're told to do, and we'll cover your ass. And the message for future policymakers will be: If you can find someone at the Department of Justice to say it's OK, then anything goes - literally, anything.

Generally speaking, some investigation is better than nothing, But the "preliminary review" Holder announced yesterday is extremely limited in its scope, not to mention circumscribed by a bounteous grant of prosecutorial immunity. From Holder's statement:

The Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees. I want to reiterate that point today, and to underscore the fact that this preliminary review will not focus on those individuals.

Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report for Newsweek that Holder's new review is limited to "'less than a dozen' cases of alleged abuse by individual CIA operatives and contractors that took place years ago."

Human rights activists are justifiably disappointed, not just because of the small scope of the review, but because it aims so low in the chain of command.

"If this ends with the prosecution of a few low ranking people who crossed the line of the fine print of the Justice memos" while leaving high ranking officials at the CIA and the White House untouched, "then it will be worse than nothing at all," added Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch, a group that has long advocated a more sweeping probe than the one Holder has ordered.

Salon's Glenn Greenwald writes:

As a practical matter, Holder is consciously establishing as the legal baseline -- he's vesting with sterling legal authority -- those warped, torture-justifying DOJ memos. Worse, his pledge of immunity today for those who complied with those memos went beyond mere interrogators and includes everyone, policymakers and lawyers alike: "the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees." Thus, as long as, say, a White House official shows that (a) the only torture methods they ordered were approved by the OLC and (b) they did not know those methods were criminal, then they would be entitled to full-scale immunity under the standard Holder announced today.

This quite likely sets up, at most, a process where a few low-level sacrificial lambs -- some extra-sadistic intelligence versions of Lynndie Englands -- might be investigated and prosecuted where they tortured people the wrong way. Those who tortured "the right way" -- meaning the way the OLC directed -- will receive full-scale immunity.

Greenwald also quotes Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, who applauded Holder's decision but noted in his statement:

I do, however, want to avoid a repeat of the Abu Ghraib experience in which lower-ranking troops who committed abuses were hung out to dry, while the senior officials who bore clear responsibility for the situation got off scot-free. In my mind, it would be wrong to focus solely on punishing individuals who went beyond the Bush Administration's guidance and committed unauthorized abuses, without looking at the senior officials who created an environment in which torture was viewed as not only permissible but necessary. Those who deliberately created an environment in which "anything goes" have no right to be surprised if low level operators exceeded the guidance they were given, and I believe that it is important to hold these senior officials accountable.

The latest release of documents, which most notably includes a 2004 report from the CIA inspector general, contains yet more shocking evidence that torture - even at its most extreme -- was explicitly approved by top Bush administration officials. Newsweek's Isikoff and Hosenball write:

[S]ome of what CIA inspector general John Helgerson concluded were excesses were endorsed by the highest levels of Justice. Helgerson's report, for example, questioned "the repetitive use" of waterboarding, the controlled drowning technique used on Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times.

But after Helgerson questioned whether such repetitive waterboarding exceeded what had been authorized by the Justice Department legal memos, he was informed by the CIA general counsel that he was wrong. The attorney general at the time, John Ashcroft, "acknowledged he is fully aware of the repetitive use of the waterboard and that CIA is well within the scope of the DOJ opinion and the authority given to CIA by that opinion," the report states. "The Attorney General was informed the waterboard had been used 119 times on a single individual."

Indeed, when this blood-curdling report first came to the attention of Bush administration officials, they weren't the least bit disturbed. R. Jeffrey Smith writes in the Washington Post:

When an internal CIA report concluded in May 2004 that "unauthorized, improvised, inhumane, and undocumented" interrogation methods had been used on suspected al-Qaeda members, the predominant reaction within the Bush administration was not revulsion but frustration that the agency's efforts inside a network of secret prisons had not been more effective, former senior intelligence and White House officials recall.

There's still a chance that what Holder started yesterday will eventually become something much bigger. Carrie Johnson writes in the Washington Post :

Legal analysts said the review, while preliminary, could expand beyond its relatively narrow mandate and ensnare a wider cast of characters. They cited U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation of the leak of a CIA operative's identity, which culminated with the criminal conviction of then-Vice President Richard B. Cheney's chief of staff.

But even that wouldn't be enough - especially if, as was the case with Fitzgerald, the prosecutor is prevented from going public with his overall findings.

What's needed is a full-throated congressional investigation like the one that Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy has called for - and that Obama's political advisers have stymied. As Leahy said in a statement yesterday, the latest release of document only "underscores why we need to move forward with a Commission of Inquiry, a nonpartisan review of exactly what happened in these areas, so that we can find out what happened and why. Who justified these policies? What was the role of the Bush White House? How can we make sure it never happens again? Information coming out in dribs and drabs will never paint the full picture."

There is so much we still don't know about what was done in our name during the Bush era. And the thing that may be the most absent is any visceral sense of how people should have behaved when their government asked them to do things that were immoral, and illegal. The answer, of course, is that they should have resisted - even spoken out. A thorough public investigation won't just expose what we did wrong and bring accountability to those who failed their moral tests, it will also call attention to those who did the right thing. And there were such people - people like Alberto Mora and Steven Kleinman and Anthony Taguba.

The more we learn, the more of them we'll find. For instance, R. Jeffrey Smith writes in the Washington Post that the former CIA inspector general who authored the 2004 report "said in an e-mailed comment on Monday that he undertook the study in part because many CIA employees involved in or aware of the program 'expressed to me personally their feelings that what the Agency was doing was fundamentally inconsistent with long-established US Government policy and with American values, and was based on strained legal reasoning.'"

The people who did the wrong thing should be punished, or at the very least exposed. And those who did the right thing should be raised up as our heroes, as our role models.

Then we can move forward -- in the right direction.

It's fashionable in media circles right now to treat the "public option" as nothing more than the political football du jour, to discuss it only in the context of vote counts and political strategizing, to write it off as a particularly hysterical obsession of the political "left", and -- oh, yes -- to declare it dead.

But the fate of the public option is not yet sealed. And it's much more than just a bargaining chip. The concept of offering health care consumers a government-run alternative to the rogues that comprise the modern American insurance industry not only has a powerful appeal to the general populace, it's central to effective health care reform, both symbolically and concretely.

In fact, the most extraordinary thing about the mainstream media's attitude toward the public option is how an opposition movement so obviously born of the insurance industry's rapacious self-interest, so blatantly fueled by calls to arms that have little to no basis on reality, and so dependent on a particularly ugly strain of know-nothingism, has become viewed by our elite journalists as the pinnacle of rational centrism.

Let's be blunt. The public option -- emphasis on the word "option" -- is a way to hold the insurance companies accountable should they (entirely unexpectedly, of course) fail to live up to their promises, ignore the rules, and keep doing things the way they have for the past several decades.

By contrast, the core of the argument against the public option is nothing more than a sort of whiny plaint of "Leave the insurance companies alone!"

But it's a well-funded plaint. The public option is a grave threat to the regime of obscene profit-making that has left the health care industry with plenty of cash to now throw in reform's way.

The growing "opposition" to the public plan is a direct result of that money. This is -- remember -- exactly how money works in Washington. It buys congressmen. It buys message. It generates publicity. It even makes presidents flinch. For the political journalists to whom this is all just a big game, those are the things that matter the most: Who's up and who's down, who's winning the message wars, the soundbite battles and the day's "visuals."

But the public option deserves better journalism than that. It deserves to be covered for what it means. And in this case, what a public option that provides an alternative to consumers means is that there would actually be consequences in the coming years if things don't turn out the way our good-hearted leaders intend.

Without consequences -- as we've seen in the runaway national security establishment of the Bush era or the colossally irresponsible behavior of financial titans that drove our economy to the brink of disaster -- things go out of control. Anything goes -- regardless of the "rules."

Are you really confident, for instance, that the insurance industry will work hard to control health care costs? Our health insurance chieftains have been talking about that for decades. But rather than do it, they seem perfectly happy taking a big cut of an ever-bigger pie -- and focusing their cost-cutting energies on denying coverage to people when they need it. This seems to work for them. Changing the rules under which they operate may have some modest impact on their behavior, but not nearly as much as will looking over their shoulders and seeing a government-run program bending the cost curve, lowering rates, and improving service.

The presence of an alternative -- a choice -- is critical. It's also about as American as apple pie. The insurance companies themselves understand this very well. The industry-backed PR firms that are bankrolling and inciting ostensibly "grassroots" protests understand this. That's why they encourage talking points about a "government takeover" of health care, rather than anything based in reality. They know full well that a public insurance option -- that, initially, relatively few people could even avail themselves of -- doesn't lead to doctors working for the government or committee of bureaucrats deciding who lives and dies.

That's also the reason why critics were absolutely right to cry foul when the word "choice" was removed from a recent poll's question about the public option -- and support predictably "dropped" like a rock. (See Sam Stein's latest on that story.)

The single biggest mystery about the public option remains: Why is the White House so peripatetic in its support for the measure? Who is whispering in President Obama's ear that compromise is the way to go here, when nobody else is compromising; that bipartisanship is still the goal, when the Republicans are clearly gearing up to use health care as a wedge issue; that health care co-ops, which no one can even define, are a legitimate alternative?

The high priests of Washington conventional wisdom summed things up this morning in a Washington Post editorial calling for the public plan to die. "This is not a matter of ideology but of political nose-counting," said the editorial. "[T]here's no way to amass 60 votes with a public option in the bill."

Now as it happens, that last part, as Ryan Grim wrote recently, ain't necessarily so. With a little gumption, Obama and Democratic leaders could present the caviling Democrats with an up or down vote on a bill that includes a public option -- and dare them to torpedo the whole package.

But regardless: The goal isn't just to get something passed. That's how you end up with no-reform boondoggles like "No Child Left Behind."

Real reform doesn't emerge from government by (faulty) nose-counting. It requires respect for the facts, a serious approach to the issues -- and a little common sense. Oh wait, that's just crazy leftist talk.

This week's news offered enormous vindication to those of us who watched the Bush Administration with, shall we say, a jaundiced eye.

First, on Tuesday, came a massive release of documents from the House Judiciary Committee, definitively establishing once and for all that the Bush White House actively turned the Justice Department into a political enforcement tool by firing prosecutors who weren't sufficiently obedient, that Karl Rove was into it up to his eyeballs, and that he lied when he said he wasn't. These were not things that reasonable people who had been following this story at all closely had any doubts about whatsoever. But there it is, all documented now -- and those documents are also in the possession of Nora Dannehy, a federal prosecutor who, as a New York Times editorial points out, could bring criminal charges against Rove et. al. for the firings "if she finds that they were done to obstruct justice or for other illegal reasons." Hope springs eternal.

And then in Thursday's Washington Post, Barton Gellman informed us that former vice president Dick Cheney is actually letting it all out - going semi-public with views we've long suspected, but never imagined he'd actually confirm out loud. Apparently, he's muttering to former colleagues that George W. Bush went soft in his second term. And far from having any regrets about his own conduct, an associate said, "there was a sense that they hadn't gone far enough. If he'd been equipped with a group of people as ideologically rigorous as he was, they'd have been able to push further." Can you imagine? Apparently he's ticked that Bush "halted the waterboarding of accused terrorists, closed secret CIA prisons, sought congressional blessing for domestic surveillance, and reached out diplomatically to Iran and North Korea, which Cheney believed to be ripe for 'regime change.'" A former top aide, John P. Hannah, tells Gellman that Cheney "really feels he has an obligation" to save the country from danger. It's kind of nice to see Cheney's obsessive megalomania right there on display, isn't it?

Indeed, it's worth pointing out that pretty much anytime we find out something new about the Bush era, the result is profound, consistent vindication for all the central pillars of the Bush critique chronicled in my washingtonpost.com column and elsewhere over the years.

But here's the thing. I'm getting oddly little satisfaction from this -- because I'm increasingly troubled about this presidency. At the heart of all the tragedies of the Bush years was the White House's fundamental untrustworthiness. They didn't tell us the truth. And sometimes -- more often than we still want to believe -- they flat-out lied to us. Lack of transparency was also a fatal flaw. When people can't see into the White House (and the people inside don't want to look out) bad things happen. As they surely did.

By contrast, the Obama White House was a model of transparency -- for two, maybe three days. It was a brief Golden Age, reaching its pinnacle on that glorious Day Two, when the president dramatically proclaimed that "the way to make government accountable is make it transparent so that the American people can know exactly what decisions are being made, how they're being made, and whether their interests are being well served."

Once the White House press corps had endured a few briefings with consistently cagey Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, however, it quickly became clear that the relative guilelessness some of us had hoped for was nowhere to be found. Indeed, the internal workings of this White House have turned out to be almost as opaque as the last one.

And now comes the Obama White House's first really major credibility crisis. If you believe that the White House made major concessions to Big Pharma in a secret deal last month -- and the evidence for that is considerable -- then there's a name for the series of conflicting denials that Gibbs and others have issued in the last week. It's called lying.

How did it come to this? I think the answer is actually quite simple. Obama, and/or Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, and/or Senior Adviser David Axelrod, and/or confidante Valerie Jarrett -- in other words, whatever combination of people are actually making the decisions over there -- are trying to do something impossible. They're trying to make everyone happy in the health-care debate.

But the chasm between the interests of the health industry and the American public is fundamentally unbridgeable. Without the kinds of cost controls that will make the health industry titans used to utterly obscene profits howl and snarl and fight back with everything they've got, universal, quality health care will continue to be unaffordable for this country and its people. Without some mechanism to check the impulses of the insurance industry -- like a public plan option -- and without the ability to force prescription drug prices down, Obama's plan just won't work.

So in trying to make the deal appear palatable to all parties, White House officials are reduced to either lying to one side, or the other, or both. And to reporters, when they start to ask pesky questions, as well.

I sympathize with the desire to make everyone happy. And I even sympathize with the desire, during intense negotiations, to play things close to the vest. But we're almost to the endgame -- and the loss of credibility Obama is risking here is potentially devastating to his agenda going forward. So it's time for Obama to draw some lines in the sand, and be honest about where they are.

A Souring Public

It's not surprising to me that Obama's poll numbers are going down. Part of that is most assuredly due to a GOP-fueled resurgence of the ugliest aspects of our national character -- nativism, racism, and know-nothingism -- within a population that it's hard to imagine were big Obama boosters in the first place. But I suspect the poll numbers are also reflecting a growing disillusionment among those who placed a lot of hope in an Obama presidency -- disillusionment that he's not standing up for what the people who voted for him stood up for in November.

And not just disillusionment, either. Anger, too. Professor Drew Westen, an astute analyst of the national psyche, blogged yesterday that "if Americans are starting to turn populist anger toward a White House that has doggedly refused to focus that anger where it belongs -- toward the banks, the mortgage brokers, the regulators who failed to regulate, the oil companies that have blocked energy reform for decades while racking up record profits, the health insurance companies that make their profits by denying coverage and discriminating against the ill, the pharmaceutical companies whose lobbyists have negotiated away the right to negotiate, and the Republicans who bankrupted the treasury during the eight long years of the Bush Presidency and crashed the economy on their way out -- I can understand why."

Now, maybe Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein is right, and it's not a lack of effort or will or clarity on Obama's part that's to blame for Washington's inability to achieve bold and effective health-care reform. Klein writes that when it comes to domestic initiatives, the modern presidency simply isn't very powerful -- at least not "[c]ompared with the structural power of Congress to block legislative change, the tendency of the public to fear legislative change and the capacity of industry to fight legislative change."

But having watched Congress go belly up time again during the last administration, it seems clear to me that the president can exert enormous pressure on the legislature if he can harness the power of an angry (or scared) electorate.

Paul Krugman writes in his New York Times column today that what's missing from Obama's repertoire right now "is a sense of passion and outrage -- passion for the goal of ensuring that every American gets the health care he or she needs, outrage at the lies and fear-mongering that are being used to block that goal."

So it's time for Obama to stand up, to fight -- and to speak the truth.

In a Wall Street Journal article and accompanying video published Wednesday, Jonathan Weisman and Neil King Jr. accuse President Obama of micromanaging and mock him for his attention to what they consider minutiae.

Says Weisman:

You know, every president has to make a decision, you know, are you going to fly way up high and look down on policy at 30,000 feet, sort of like George W. Bush did, or are you going to get down into the weeds and sometimes run into the risk of micromanagement, like Jimmy Carter did. Barack Obama has kind of tended toward the weeds....

President Obama, not only does he want to hear about the unemployment rates -- he wants to hear about the U6, the underemployment rate! A few weeks ago, they were talking about child obesity rates, and what to do about childhood nutrition. These things go into the weeds.

For the record, the U6 includes not just those traditionally labeled unemployed, but those who have given up looking for jobs and those who are employed part-time for economic reasons. That makes it arguably the most accurate measure of the impact the recession is having on American workers. And childhood hunger and obesity have a long, important and complicated interrelationship.

In the article, Weisman and King even go so far as to blame Obama's declining approval ratings not on, say, a massive lobbying and astroturf campaign by industries opposed to his policies, or on an angry nativism movement, but on the president's desire to understand things:

Whatever the merits or flaws of Mr. Obama's style, it sometimes has trouble translating with opponents, and the country at large. Following a smooth first few months in office, he has seen his agenda stall amid rising opposition, even from some members of his own party. His approval rating with the public in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll late last month was barely over 50%, down from 61% in April.

There are all sorts of legitimate reasons to be concerned about Obama's approach to governing.

But particularly after the presidency of George W. Bush, who so often seemed detached both from details and reality, Obama's intellectual curiosity is one thing journalists in particular should celebrate, not sneer at. It's the know-nothings we should be exposing, not the know-somethings.